Last Thursday, President Bush signed into law a prohibition on posting annoying Web messages or sending annoying e-mail messages without disclosing your true identity.
You’re facing fines and up to two years in prison for irritating other users of the Web, now. Huzzah! -_-
The idea is to stop spammers, but just HOW are they going to keep track what defines as “annoying”? Well, I guess the people who live off of suing people will be jumping in joy. Whee.
Edit: There, that better? Don’t wanna be annoying, after all.
That’s a horribly biased and untrue characterization of what actually happened. It would seem better to blame the sponsors of the section governing cyberstalking. Or possibly the various other congressmen who voted to pass the bill without trying to amend it to take out such a ludicrous regulation. Hell, the article says the Senate voted unanimously and that the House did it by a simple voice vote. I guess it’s better to blame merely the person signing the bill into law despite the fact that if he had vetoed it, the bill would’ve become law anyway.
But hey. It’s George W. Bush, the source of all evil in the world; of course he’s at fault.
While unconstitutional, it was voted on by congress and signed, not veto’d, by the president. Once the bicameralism and presentment requirements are met, it’s law. The only way to strike it down now is to sue under it and you need to be ACTUALLY injured by the law first in order to do it. Even if no one sues and no one enforces it? It won’t be ‘struck down’, it’ll remain in the books.
So we won’t see the end of it for quite some while.
I stopped being surprised by your government a long while ago. At least I thought I had, before this.
Now lets be realistic: We can’t send Nutter to jail with this. Mainly because he lives in Britain, but even if he didn’t, I really doubt anyone would ever actually enforce this on a sole user. This is pointed towards punishing spam mail and trash. When… if some entity responsible for large amounts of junk is put on trial, this would serve as simply another weight to shift the balance against them like Dev said.
I believe this law is being misrepresented. If it’s the anti-spam law that was passed several years ago, then the law protects users from obscene amounts, not just annoying pop ups but massive amount of spam. The law works through tracing back various spam messages and analyzing the volume of which the spam is sent out. I think, at least.
This law is done in the same right as the No-Call list that was passed several years ago as well that protects people from those irritating phone calls about long distance and cruises and such.
What I don’t understand is how this at all affects the first amendment and is in anyway unconstitutional. I find this law to be gratifying and am pretty thankful for it.
